


The body heroic.

by spqr



Series: Author’s favorites. [5]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Minor Character Death, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Podfic Available, Resurrected Tony Stark, Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts, Перевод на русский | Translation in Russian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-13
Updated: 2019-11-13
Packaged: 2021-01-30 06:40:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21423850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spqr/pseuds/spqr
Summary: The worst dreams are the good ones. The ones he doesn’t want to wake up from, where he lays in bed for long minutes begging his body to let him go back to sleep so he can feel that happiness again, just for a second.Usually those dreams are about Tony. Naked and laughing in Peter’s bed, which in his subconscious is always their bed--their bed in their apartment in their life. Peter wishes he hadn’t loved Tony so much because then maybe his sleeping mind wouldn’t be able to render him so well, but everything is in perfect, agonizing detail.
Relationships: Peter Parker/Tony Stark
Series: Author’s favorites. [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1497707
Comments: 61
Kudos: 495





	The body heroic.

**Author's Note:**

> Russian translation by DocHudson available here:
> 
> https://ficbook.net/readfic/9342724/23945953

Peter gets a tattoo on his hip that says **don’t panic.**

Well, actually, he _tries_ to get a tattoo, but the next morning he wakes up to find ink all over his shirt because his dumb super healing squeezed it out of his body. So he asks Wolverine how he made his (a heart that has _Marie _in it) stick, and Logan tells him if he makes the ink out of his own blood his body won’t attack it.

A few years ago it would’ve been the sort of thing Peter would balk over, but it seems like nothing now. The next day, he goes back to the tattoo parlor with a travel bottle of his own blood and the artist barely bats an eye, takes the blood and inks **don’t panic **into the bone of his pelvis in deep crimson.

#

Happy and Aunt May get shot a week after their wedding.

Peter’s halfway around the world when it happens, assissting Doctor Strange on a demonic containment inssue in Shanghai, but he’ll swear until the day he dies that he felt it when it happened. One second he’s swinging around the Oriental Pearl Tower, the next he’s falling out of the air like he just hit one of Sue Storm’s forcefields, limbs useless, muscles jelly. Wong gets to him an instant before he turns into a pancake on the pavement, but for the first few weeks after Peter wishes he hadn’t.

It’s got nothing to do with him. Peter isn’t sure if that makes it better or worse--that the guy who killed the last two family members he had left just happened to be walking by when he saw Happy’s next gen StarkWatch and decided this rich looking man and his new wife would be good targets for a mugging.

Happy tried to fight him, because of course he did. And then the guy freaked out--he’d just shot someone and there was a _witness_, so instead of runnning off and disappearing into the sunset, he turned the gun on May and shot her, too.

Problem solved, except the idiot never stopped to think that a watch like that probably had a tracker. When Peter finds him, he’s trying to pawn the watch at a shop with a _Cash for Gold _sign out front, and Peter beats him so bad he’s surprised when the medics show up and he hears them from three blocks away saying _we’ve got a pulse. _He thought he killed him. He wanted to kill him. He doesn’t feel relieved at all that the man is still alive--the only thing he feels is acutely, painfully alone.

When he gets home, to the house that May and Happy bought in Queens, the one he has a room in, he yanks his mask off and presses his forehead to the wall and tries to re-establish his grasp on reality. Not that he really wants to grasp it.

This is real, he tells himself, feeling the slightly bumpy texture of paint under his skin, the skin rolling thin against his skull. This is real, his knees still like jelly even days after Shanghai. This is real, his fingers punching through the drywall even though he didn’t even realize he was putting on any pressure. Real, he’s still alive inside his dumb unkillable body, no matter how much he doesn’t want to be right now.

#

The tattoo is because there’s no one to tell him anymore. There’s no one to knock on the bathroom door when he’s curled up on the tile having a panic attack and ask if he’s alright, no one to hold his head in their hands and say, _Breathe. Come on, breathe with me, Pete. Just like that. In and out. You’re okay_.

Here and now, all Peter Parker has is Peter Parker. So he gets it tattooed upside down, like his body’s telling it to his mind: **don’t panic.**

#

Somehow, he misses Tony the most.

Even with everyone else gone--May, Ben, Happy, his parents, Gwen, Johnny--when he gets back to his empty apartment just before dawn after a night of tough patrols, all he wants is for Tony to come out of the bedroom in lounge pants and bare feet and draw him into some technobabble exploration of whatever project he has spread out over their bed, let Peter pick apart his math while he patches up the cut on his forehead.

He wants it so bad it makes him want to hit something, sometimes, over how exhausted and hollowed out he feels not having it. Not having Tony.

Green Goblin hits him with some toxin that give him the flu times a million, and Peter spends a week and a half shuffling miserably between his couch and his bathroom and his kitchen, too feeble to walk downstairs to the bodega and not sure whether it’s more dangerous to not eat until the illness passes or risk exposing the GrubHub guy to whatever super bug this is. The whole time, through the agonizing haze of fever and sweat and hallucinations of Norman Osborn laughing at him from behind his shower curtain, all Peter wants is Tony. He’d sell his own soul just to be able to talk to him on the phone.

He rests his forehead against the seat of his toilet, the taste of regurgitated chicken soup and bile in his mouth, and imagines Tony’s hands on his back. Tony inhabiting the space next to him, offering him a dozen things a minute--Gatorade and tea biscuits and new experimental Tamiflu meant to work with Peter’s metabolism, Green Goblin’s head on a platter and an improved air filtration system in his suit so this never happens again--not realizing that the only thing Peter needs to feel better is Tony and a pile of blankets on the couch and something mindless on tv.

He imagines whole conversations in his head (maybe partially the fever’s fault). Imagines coming out of a coughing fit and saying, “Ouch.”

Imagines Tony saying, “You okay? You need me to amputate?”

“Amputate what? My throat?”

“I’ll build you a new throat. How hard can it be?”

“I don’t know, I feel like I kind of need my throat. Am I gonna sound like a robot? Are you gonna give me a girl’s voice? I swear, if it’s Scottish--”

“What’s wrong with Scottish?”

“Nothing, except your raging fetish for Scottish accents.”

“Hey, I resent that. So does FRIDAY.”

“Sorry, FRIDAY.”

“What, no sorry for me? The love of your life?”

But the smile always drops off Peter’s face as soon as he comes back to himself--feeling even more pathetic than when he was a dumb highschooler who trailed after Tony like a puppy. Tony’s never going to take care of him when he’s sick, he’s never going to greet him when he gets home, he’s never going to smile that quick delighted smile at Peter ever again, because he’s dead. He’s been dead a long time.

#

Peter loses his virginity to Johnny Storm on top of the Baxter Building. He’s been working with the Four a lot ever since Beck unmasked him on national tv, because they fortuitously appeared on the scene just in time to take over the 24 hour news cycle right after his and he figured that was as good a sign as any.

He likes Johnny. They get along, they fight well together, they have the same gen z sense of humor. When they’re not busy fending off intergalactic threats they like to sit around with a stack of six packs and try to race their metabolisms to get drunk. Peter’s kind of sort of buzzed when Johnny starts taking his suit off, but not really.

_Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, _he remembers Tony telling him once, though now he can’t remember why. _Don’t do anything I would do, either._

Would Tony do this? Peter doesn’t know, he’s lost his moral compass, but it feels good. It feels good, so he gets down on his hands and knees on the concrete with his mask still on and opens his mouth breathlessly at the newfound, alien feeling of a dick pushing past his hole for the first time, filling him up so well that it’s like there’s no more room for his lungs, no room for oxygen in his body. He drops down onto his elbows, concrete scraping him up because the suit’s off, Johnny’s hands sweaty on his hips and everything below his waist a mess of slick sensation and stickiness.

It isn’t until Johnny reaches around to wrap a hand around his dick and Peter has to bite down on a _T _that he realizes his mind isn’t on this roof with the most eligible bachelor in New York, it’s still at a funeral. It’s wondering about the afterlife, if it’s true what people say--that your lost loved ones can watch you from wherever they are. It’s wondering if Tony’s watching him now, if he’s up in the clouds looking down watching Peter get fucked, watching Peter beg for it, or if he’s standing three feet away, right there by that exhaust vent, separated by the veil between worlds, crouching down in front of Peter’s face and trying to touch him, his ghostly fingers going right through.

A shiver wobbles down Peter’s spine. Johnny bites out, “Fuck, Spidey,” and tightens his grip like a vice on Peter’s dick, and he comes with a sob.

#

It’s an actual sob, too.

Peter manages to keep it all locked down until he’s got his suit on and Johnny’s cleaning up the six packs they demolished, until he can hop off the roof and swing a safe distance away to hide in an alcove eighty storeys off the ground.

He nestles back into the cold stone next to a gargoyle, tears his mask off and _cries_. It’s the first time he’s cried since he buried Gwen a year ago, and he’s shocked--so shocked he doesn’t know what to do when it hits him. All his emotions come up in a mess, the constant fear and stress and the grief that follows him around like a black cloud, the weight of everyone he’s lost breaking over him all at once. He grinds his forehead into the gargoyle’s side until he bleeds, cursing whatever fucking higher power decided to let everyone’s lost loved ones watch over them but not help, not reach out and touch.

One minute.

He gives himself one minute, counting in his head past the unbearable sinus pressure, and then he grits his teeth and shoves it all down. Wipes the blood off his face, lets the cut dry in the night air--freezing all the way up here--drops off the edge of the alcove, shoots off a web just in time to avoid hitting the ground, and hurtles toward home.

#

Sometimes he writes their names on his skin, just to feel like they’re with him. His chicken scratch handwriting stands out bold in black sharpie on the insides of his calves: **_May Parker. Ben Parker. Gwen Stacy. Happy Hogan. Tony Stark._**

It’s not really anything, but to him it feels like something. It feels like in some way, they’re still with him, still proud of him, still up waiting for him to get home safe. Peter hoards them like secrets, even though he doesn’t have anyone to keep secrets from.

#

The nightmares are worse than they’ve ever been.

He wakes up in the middle of the night feeling like something’s crushing him. And it’s not the building the Vulture dropped on him, it’s everyone he couldn’t save, all those people--all _his _people piling on him on his shitty spring mattress in his shitty shoebox apartment, dead weight pressing him down through the mattress to the floor, and even though he’s awake it’s like he’s paralyzed, and the body closest to his in the heap, the one whose dead grey eyes are pressed right up against his face--it’s always Tony.

When it’s that nightmare he lays there for hours, reminding himself like a mantra: **don’t panic. **But that’s not always the nightmare he has.

He dreams about Thanos. He dreams about turning to dust, about the look on Tony’s face while he was disintegrating. He dreams about the battlefield, skidding up to Tony’s body too late, when he was already dead in Pepper’s arms. He dreams that the Venom symbiote is somehow still inside him, poisoning his mind, that it will use him to hurt people. He dreams that he’s sixteen again, that Tony finds out he’s in love with him and laughs him out of the lab, out of the Avengers compound, straight out of his life.

The worst dreams are the good ones. The ones he doesn’t want to wake up from, where he lays in bed for long minutes begging his body to let him go back to sleep so he can feel that happiness again, just for a second.

Usually those dreams are about Tony. Naked and laughing in Peter’s bed, which in these dreams is always _their _bed--their bed in their apartment in their life. Peter wishes he hadn’t loved Tony so much because then maybe his sleeping mind wouldn’t be able to render him so well, but everything is in perfect, agonizing detail.

Tony dragging lazy kisses down his chest, goatee raising goosebumps on Peter’s hyper-sensitive skin. His graying hair between Peter’s fingers, his scalp and the shape of his skull under Peter’s hands, the rumble of his moan vibrating up through his bones and up Peter’s arms, against Peter’s sternum, like the noise is coming out of Tony and flooding into Peter, a transfusion of _want_as Tony scrapes his teeth over Peter’s pebbled nipple and then soothes it with his tongue, the inside of his mouth hot and wet and Peter arcs up into the heavy press of his body, making a sound like _guh._

Tony looks up from Peter’s chest with a wicked smile. “Down to monosyllables already, huh, kid? Glad to see I’ve still got it.”

Peter swats at his head. “No cockiness in bed. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Bed is all _about _cockiness, Pete,” Tony quips, but when Peter doesn’t say anything more, his expression softens. “I like that you’re inexperienced,” he tells him, eyes earnest. “Love it, actually. It means I’m the only one who’s been _here…” _He presses a kiss to Peter’s side, almost in his armpit…

“And _here…” _His lips graze Peter’s hipbone…

“And _here…” _

Peter jolts like he’s been electrocuted when he feels Tony’s tongue on the throbbing head of his dick. His hands tighten in Tony’s hair so abruptly he’s worried he’s going to hurt him. But Tony just hums and sinks deeper onto him, holding his hips, and--

That’s always when Peter wakes up.

Always right before he comes, so that he has to slip his hand in his boxers and finish the job himself, the sounds of New York outside his window, eight million people crammed into this goddamn city and none of them the one he needs.

#

The Chameleon must wait until he’s vulnerable to send the LMDs.

Peter can’t figure out any other explanation for the timing--one day he and the Four are packing in the search for Johnny in the Negative Zone, having him officially declared dead and burying an empty coffin, and the next he’s standing in the middle of Central Park staring at his parents. He only recognizes them from pictures on May and Ben’s mantelpiece, but the sight of them still hits him like a baseball bat in the gut.

It’s too good to be true. He knows it, even while he’s helping them settle into their new house, listening to stories of their twenty year captivity in Europe, eating his mom’s cooking and helping his dad get his old files out of storage.

But he can’t figure out what the catch is, because he hasn’t seen them since he was two. He doesn’t remember enough to spot the inconsisitencies. If the Chameleon had sent Tony, or May, he would’ve noticed it wasn’t them right away.

With his parents, it takes a month. Even then, he only “notices” because they try to kill him.

He walks through the door and his mom shoots him in the chest.

For the first few minutes, he just tries to subdue them, thinking this is all some sort of misunderstanding, but then one of his webs sends his dad crashing into the coffee table, his head slams on the corner, and a chunk of his flesh rips off, revealing the circuitry underneath. Then, gritting his teeth against tears, fighting down nausea and calling himself a stupid bitch over and over again in his head, Peter takes them apart. Piece by piece, a kitchen knife to the eye and a burst of webbing down the throat, punching straight through his mom’s ribcage to grab a fistful of wires and yank them out, sparking, dropping the big heavy bookshelf from the top of the stairs down two flights onto his dad’s legs.

At the end of it, he’s laying in the kitchen with his parents--_not his parents _he knows now, but they still look like his parents, he thought they were his parents for a full month--torn to pieces around him, oil oozing out of them like blood.

He tells Karen to hold off on the medbots and mutes his earpiece, then works his sweatshirt down over his gunshot wound and watches blood pour out of it with fascination. He presses his thumb into the hole, barely feels the pain but feels the hard metal nub of the bullet lodged inside him. Maybe if he pushes it deeper, it will work.

#

Doctor Strange summons Peter to the New York Sanctum the day before his twenty-fourth birthday. He refuses to tell him what it’s about, but Peter’s been dealing with the Sorcerer Supreme for long enough that he just rolls his eyes and goes. Strange has always had an unaccountable need to create mystery where none exists.

Fifteen minutes after Peter steps out his front door, he’s standing in front of a pane of magical one-way glass, thinking **don’t panic, don’t panic, don’t panic.**

On the other side of the glass is Tony Stark.

He’s in a hoodie and jeans, sitting up on a mahogany table with his feet in the chair, just to be fucking contrary, like always. He looks tired, like he just got done a seventy-two hour engineering binge--hair kind of greasy, deep circles under his eyes, hands shaky like they get when needs to eat something--but otherwise no worse for wear. It’s…it’s impossible, is what it is, but Peter reaches forward and puts both his palms flat against the glass, feeling it cold and smooth against them, and tells himself, Real.

The love of his life scrubbing his hands over his face and bouncing his knee--real. Peter knows Tony too well. He can’t be fooled. Not like with his parents.

“How?” he says, shaky.

Doctor Strange is silent for a long moment, like he’s trying to come up with an answer. Like he doesn’t know. “Probably debt magic,” he says at last. “When a sorcerer dies, they can assign their life force to someone else. Usually they choose a baby, or next of kin, but…a lot of people out there owe Tony Stark everything.”

Peter knows what that’s like.

“What’s the catch?” he asks, dreading the answer. “Strings, conditions?”

“As far as I can see…” Strange shrugs. “None.”

It can’t be that easy. The thought runs through Peter’s mind on loop as he steps into the room, feeling like he’s about to faint or vomit or void his bowels or something. It _can’t _be as easy as this, except it is. It _is._

Because Tony looks up at him and says, “Kid?”

Peter chokes out, “Tony.”

And then he’s collapsing into Tony’s arms, standing between his legs up against the table, Tony the only thing holding him up while all the fight goes out of his body and he just shakes and shakes, too full of emotion even to cry. Tony runs his hand up and down Peter’s back, comforting pressure against his spine, and the smell of him is exactly the same, like motor oil and copper and expensive aftershave. Neither of them says anything, but Tony turns a kiss into the side of Peter’s head, and Peter digs his fingertips into Tony’s shoulders just to feel that he’s warm, he’s alive, he’s not a dead body_._

“It’s me,” Tony murmurs, too quiet for anyone to hear on the other side of the glass. “It’s me, Pete. I’m here. Breathe with me, okay? Just breathe.”

#

Some days, especially right after May and Happy are killed, the only reason Peter doesn’t kill himself is because he thinks Tony would be disappointed. Also, he’s not sure he knows _how, _with his dumb unkillable radioactive superhero body working against him--he can survive falling from the top of the Empire State, there are no drugs he can OD on, and his wrists would heal before he had time to bleed out.

But mostly it’s the disappointment. Peter doesn’t think he could stand it if he got to the afterlife and finally met Tony again, only to have him turn away in disgust.

#

Peter gives Tony a wide berth for the first few months.

Some small part of him insists he’s just trying to give Tony space to get used to how things are now, almost a decade after he died--get used to his daughter being a pre-teen and his wife being married to someone else. But most of him knows that he just doesn’t know how to deal with Tony being back.

He’s built himself into a person that can only be Spider-Man because he almost never has to be Peter Parker, but every time he sees Tony he turns into a scared kid again. All the building blocks come down--he can’t keep up the façade of being okay around Tony, and he can’t be Spider-Man without it, and he can’t _stop_being Spider-Man because people need him, so he has to stop seeing Tony. The logic checks out.

Except it’s impossible to ignore that they’re no longer separated by the veil between worlds. A few miles away, in what used to be Stark Tower, Tony’s breathing and sleeping and eating and shitting on the same plane of existence as Peter. Peter could swing over there right now, go up to the penthouse and tell Tony he’s been in love with him since he was sixteen. He could grab onto him, he could hit him, he could pull him in and bite his mouth. He feels like he’s bursting out of his skin with the need to do _something_, but he can’t--because to be Spider-Man, he can’t be Peter Parker.

**_Tony Stark_**_, _he writes on the inside of his thigh, just to feel that secret cameraderie that got him through the dark days. Tony’s close, he’s nearby, but he’s still the farthest away he’s been from Peter in years. Since he died.

Peter jerks off in the midday light and comes with three fingers crammed up his hole thinking of Tony, and somehow he feels guiltier now than he did when Tony was gone, as guilty as he felt whenever he masturbated back in his bed at his and May’s apartment. But the guilt gets boxed up with the rest of it, all part of the routine--washing jizz off his hands and putting Icy-Hot on his bruises while his emotions rearrange themselves neatly in his chest, a place for everything and everything in its place.

#

Venom is the worst. Peter feels like an imposter in his own body for weeks after he shakes the possession, his skin clammy and ill-fitting and wrong. He can’t sleep. He tosses and turns for hours, watching morning turn to midday turn to afternoon, unable to shake the feeling that as soon as he closes his eyes Venom will be back.

Gwen helps. She sits cross-legged on his bed, taps her fingertips on his knee and sings the words **don’t panic **very quietly under her breath like a lullaby. But then she’s gone, just a few days after he works up the courage to kiss her, and Peter’s alone again.

#

Tony doesn’t wait for Peter to get his shit together.

He knows where Peter lives, of course, because he can still track Karen. So he waits until Peter falls in after patrol early one morning, probably watching Peter’s movements on his StarkPhone the whole time, and then he rings the buzzer.

Peter lets him up, because there’s really nothing else to do, and by the time Tony’s standing in his kitchen, he’s changed out of the suit and into his usual house clothes--track pants, t-shirt. It’s weird having Tony in his space, casual with his hands in his pockets, surveying the extent of Peter’s personal kingdom with the same curious expression he gave Peter’s web shooters the first time he saw them. “Nice place, Pete,” he says.

“Thanks,” Peter deadpans. “It’s a mid-century modern revival. I restored the crown molding myself.” And opens the fridge at the weird angle that keeps the door from falling off. “What brings you all the way to Queens?”

To his credit, Tony doesn’t skirt the issue. “You’re avoiding me.”

Peter cracks open a Gatorade. “I’m not. Gatorade?”

“No, and you are. You totally are.”

“You sure?” Peter wags the bottle. “I’ve got the good flavors.”

“There are good flavors?”

“Not really. But the electrolytes are nice, especially after a patrol. And there are some that are easier to choke down than others, so. _Good flavors_.”

“Great, Pete. I’m glad.” Tony rubs his forehead, frustrated. “I’m so glad you’ve got your fucking--electrolytes. Fuck. Look, is it Titan? Is that what this is about? I’m sorry I couldn’t save you. No one’s ever been more sorry about anything, ever.”

Peter frowns. “What? What are you talking about?”

“Well, clearly I’ve done something to piss you off. If it’s not that, what is it?”

“Nothing,” Peter insists. “Nothing, Tony.”

Tony looks at him desperately, like he needs something only Peter can give him or he’s going to die. “What happened?” he asks. “Between then and now. Because it didn’t--I swear we didn’t used to be like this. You and me.”

Peter shifts his eyes to the floor. “A lot happened. Too much to tell you.”

“Bullshit,” Tony says. Peter looks back up, and Tony’s poised like he’s ready for a fight, like he’ll fight Peter into telling him everything. “It’s _me, _kid.”

“Yeah,” Peter breathes. “Yeah, it’s you.”

And maybe it’s finally hitting him for the first time, for _real_, that Tony’s back and he’s alive and he’s standing in Peter’s shoebox apartment, that his list of ghosts just got one name shorter. But he’s suddenly flooded with a rush of electricity, a need to tell Tony every single thing that’s happened in the last eight years, down to the last detail--down to every dream he had and every place he and Johnny fucked and every time he went to the grocery store and had to count out coupons to be able to pay for it all.

He wants to crack open his ribcage and invite Tony to make himself at home, but he doesn’t know how, so instead he does the next best thing. He puts the Gatorade down, pulls Tony in by the back of the neck and kisses him.

Tony freezes underneath him, like a man turned to stone. Then Peter wraps both arms around his neck and tugs on him to get him moving, and Tony shocks back to life, suddenly thawed. His hands are on the back of Peter’s skull, then the small of his back, then under his ass as he lifts him off the floor, and Peter wraps his legs around Tony’s waist and it’s the first time in eight years he hasn’t felt the weight of his own body. It’s amazing.

#

Back in high school, when Aunt May left him home alone, he’d lock himself in the bathroom with a pair of scissors. It was never about hurting himself, because he’d already been bitten and the cuts healed before he was even done making them, skin sealed before the blood had a chance to ooze out. One time he carved the word **hero **and watched as it disappeared, one letter at a time, like wiping condensation off a mirror.

A lot of kids must say they’re not trying to self-harm when they cut, but for Peter it’s true. He’s not. He’s just trying to figure out how to feel at home again in his own body--this body that’s almost, but not quite, human.

#

It’s about borders, okay?

It’s about--listen, we’re standing here in a room together, you and me, and I’m in my body and you’re in yours, and we’re never going to be the same person unless I was born from a part of you or you reach inside my chest and pull out my heart or we fall on the floor in a tangle of limbs and make love.

All of life is about trying to get out of your body and into someone else’s, and ever since Peter’s come back he’s wanted to be a ghost or he’s wanted to be a superhero instead of just a scared kid but most of all he’s wanted to be Tony Stark. He’s wanted to be Tony Stark and he’s wanted to be with him, and he can’t be him because no one can and he can’t be with him because he’s dead, so mostly he just walks around feeling trapped in his own skin, but the thing is he’s gotten used to feeling trapped. He’s gotten good at it.

#

Peter thought he was going to die without ever getting to love someone again.

Without ever getting to hold someone in his arms and feel this warm tsunami of affection, this overwhelming sense of being in it _together_, him and Tony against the world, him and Tony stumbling down the hall to Peter’s bedroom, Tony’s hands in his hair and Peter’s legs wrapped around his waist and nothing in the entire city of New York but the two of them, lips pressed tight and urgent together.

Tony jerks to a stop in the doorway, mere feet away from the bed, and breaks the kiss. Peter nearly loses his balance, but he reaches up and sticks his fingers to the door frame, hanging there with his t-shirt hiked up and his midriff exposed. Tony buries his face in Peter’s chest, like he can’t stand not to be touching him as much as humanly possible, and he sounds like he hates himself for it, but he asks, “Why were you avoiding me?”

Peter’s heart drops. He swallows, and unsticks one hand from the doorframe to bury it in Tony’s hair, massaging his fingers over his scalp. “It’s nothing you did.”

“Pete, please don’t lie to me while we’re--”

“No, really. Tony,” he tries to get Tony to look at him. “_Tony._”

Tony looks up, eyelashes clumped together with moisture. Peter leans down and kisses his face, his forehead, his cheeks, his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs. “I got--I got really good at being alone. I’m scared if I get used to having you again, I’m not gonna be able to go back.”

“You’re not gonna have to go back.” Tony’s hands slide up the sides of Peter’s back, rucking his shirt up even higher, his touch like a reaffirmation of his words. “I swear, kid. I got a second chance, I’m not gonna blow it this time.”

“You can’t promise that.”

“I just did.”

“I can’t--” Peter’s crying, his throat thick with tears, but it feels like something tight and solid in his chest is finally breaking apart. “I know I just got you back like ten seconds ago, but I can’t lose you again. You’re all I’ve got left.”

“Peter. You’re not going to lose me.” Tony holds his gaze, and for a split second, Peter’s pretty sure he’s talking to Iron Man, not Tony Stark. His childhood hero, the man who saved him a million times, the man who saved half the universe.

Then he breaks into a smile, the corners of his eyes crinkling in that way that’s always melted Peter’s heart, and he’s Tony again. “I’m serious. There’s a project file on my home servers called ‘immortality,’ you can ask FRIDAY.”

Peter snorts a watery laugh. “Good. I expect to be kept in the loop.”

“Buddy, you are the loop.”

Peter unsticks his other hand from the doorframe and folds over Tony, burying his face in his shoulder. Tony walks them into the room and dumps Peter on the bed, and when he follows him down, Peter latches onto him like an octopus, arms and legs wrapped as far around him as he can manage and his lips mashed against Tony’s in a way that isn’t really a kiss so much as a desperate attempt to crawl inside him.

Tony takes Peter’s face in his hands and takes control of the kiss by degrees, slowing things down until their tongues are moving together in a steady push and pull, like waves on the shore. Peter’s never seen him like this except in the heat of battle, all his frantic energy distilled to focus on one task, one opponent. One other person. It’s heady, to have all the attention--hands and murmured praise and hardening erection--of the smartest man who ever lived directed at him.

Peter feels Tony’s hand slide up under his shirt, warm and calloused, and the muscles of his abdomen jolt. Tony pulls back. “You okay, kid?”

“Yeah,” Peter breathes. “Yeah, please don’t stop touching me.”

#

For a minute there, when Venom has him, Peter’s almost relieved.

He doesn’t have to steer anymore. He doesn’t have to choose, doesn’t have to find the strength to get up in the morning, because Venom does it for him. He doesn’t have to worry about things like fingers or toes or brushing his teeth. He can retreat deep inside himself, curl up in the miasmic pillow fort of his emotions, and just float. Just exist.

But even there, as far away from the world as he’s ever managed to get--including when he was dusted--he’s still Spider-Man. And there has never been any part of Spider-Man, or Peter Parker, that can let innocent people get hurt while there’s life in his body to stop it. So he gets up. He fights his way back to the surface and he writes their names on his arm: **_Gwen Stacy. May Parker. Happy Hogan. _**And he knows that they’d be disappointed in him if he ever stopped fighting, so he never will. He never will.

#

Tony pushes Peter’s t-shirt up and over his head slowly, carefully. As he tosses it aside, the look on his face is almost reverent, like he’s gazing at something he’s waited his whole life for--something he never thought he’d get to see in person.

Peter shifts up onto his elbows, self-conscious. “I feel like you’re about to ask me if I work out. The answer is yes.”

“I know you work out,” Tony says absently. “I still have Karen’s heart monitor hooked up to my glasses. I watch your vitals all day. I just…I need a minute.”

Peter frowns. “You need a minute?”

“Yeah.” Tony starts unbuttoning his shirt, sitting back on his heels with Peter’s legs still locked around his waist. “I mean, Jesus Christ, Pete--have you seen yourself? Because, I’m sorry, but you make the rest of humanity look like God was only practicing. And, I mean--” he finishes with his shirt and throws it off the bed, “it doesn’t hurt that you’re _you. _You’re the bravest…” he leans down and frames Peter’s stomach with his hands, then drops a kiss on his skin, goatee tickling.

“_Smartest…” _he moves lower.

“_Dumbest_…” His lips graze Peter’s waistband, and Peter sucks in a breath.

“Hold on,” he manages. “Those don’t go together.”

“Oh, they do. For you, kid, they do.”

Tony hooks his fingers in the elastic waist of Peter’s track pants and yanks them down to his thighs, an expression of absolute delight stealing over his face when he realizes that Peter’s not wearing any underwear. “Peter. I am astonished. Going commando under the suit is _my _move, you shameless copycat.”

“I don’t always go commando. Sometimes I wear a thong.”

Tony’s eyes look like they’re about to burst out of his head. “No. I’m sorry, I don’t believe you. I’m gonna need photographic evidence.”

Peter smiles. “That can be arranged. Video evidence, too.”

“Dear lord.” Tony buries his face in Peter’s hip, like he can’t handle it anymore. Peter reaches down and tilts his head up, then drags him back up his body into another kiss, his bare dick trapped between their bodies.

Tony grinds his hips down, the rough fly of his jeans dragging over Peter’s erection, and the electric shock of pleasure that shoots straight to Peter’s brain sends him from coherent to dying in a second flat. He gasps into Tony’s mouth, all his insides turned to jelly, and digs his hands into Tony’s shoulders hard enough to bruise. “Please,” he says, when they break for air. “Please, Mister Stark, I need--”

“Anything,” Tony says. His face is very close to Peter’s, close enough that their noses bump but he doesn’t look away from his eyes. “Anything you want, Pete.”

“Fuck me,” Peter digs his heels into Tony’s ass.

Tony falters. “Jesus, kid.”

“Please. Please, I want to feel you.”

The tears are back in Tony’s eyes, clinging to his eyelashes. “Okay,” he ducks his head and sucks a bruise into Peter’s neck, where it meets the slope of his shoulder. “Okay, I’ve got you.” His lips trail back up to Peter’s chin, and then he’s kissing him again, a slow insistent press of mouths, like saying: you and me. you and me. you and me.

#

Peter thinks it makes sense that he wears his blood on the outside of his body. **don’t panic, **this is where his blood’s supposed to be. It’s where it ends up, anyways. Spilled out for other people, just like Tony’s and Happy’s and Ben’s.

He doesn’t understand how some people walk around their whole lives with all this blood inside their bodies and never feel the need to give any of it away. But then, Peter’s never met a problem he didn’t think he could solve by sacrificing himself.

#

Pants get kicked down around their ankles.

Tony gets his mouth on Peter’s dick for a few seconds before Peter pulls him away and gasps, _Hair trigger. _A packet of lube and a condom, and everything narrows down to the feeling of Tony’s cold, wet fingers trailing over his perineum.

Right now, in this moment, Peter’s life is as simple as it’s ever been.

Yeah, he’s in bed with a man who was dead five months ago. Yeah, they’re both Avengers, and yeah, even with the added eight years Tony’s old enough to be his dad. But what could be more simple than this--Peter’s been in love with the same man for his entire life and they’re about to prove it. That’s all.

Tony presses a finger past the tight rim of Peter’s hole, and Peter drags in a gasp against the side of Tony’s face. “More,” he demands immediately, even while he’s still adjusting to the first, still trying to catch his breath. “_More, _Tony.”

“Fuck, Pete,” Tony’s voice is tight, like he’s having trouble controlling himself, but he works another finger in, shaky and gentle. “Look at you. You’re--you’re the best thing I’ve ever seen in my entire fucking life. What the hell did I do to deserve you?”

“Not how it works,” Peter chokes out.

“No?” Tony smiles sadly. “How’s it work, then?”

“I love you. That’s how it works.”

Tony stares at him, poleaxed. “What?”

“I love you.”

Tony’s mouth hangs open. “You love me.”

“That’s what I said.”

All at once Tony surges up into him, and the kiss is a rib-spreader, a desperate press to get closer to each other. Tony’s lips taste like salt, and when he pulls back Peter can see the wet sheen of tears on his cheeks. “I love you, too,” Tony murmurs, eyes heavy. “I love you like crazy, Peter Parker.”

His fingers curl deep inside Peter, and Peter arcs up off the bed, all the air shocked out of him like a bellows. Tony drags his fingers out and pushes them back in again, fucking Peter on his hand, and Peter’s leg comes up to wrap around his naked flank, as all of Tony’s body moves between his legs with the motion of his thrusts.

When Tony pulls back to roll the condom on over his erection, the sound of the packet opening is the loudest thing in the world. The background noise of New York is a million miles away, all that’s real is Tony squeezing the base of his own dick to keep from coming, Peter’s hole sloppy and fucked open and _empty_, the nervous terrified excited overstimulated muscle of Peter’s heart fluttering wildly in his chest. Tony’s eyes find Peter’s face, and he doesn’t ask Peter if he’s sure. There’s no need for words, now.

Tony lines his dick up carefully with Peter’s hole, and then it’s one breathless moment of resistance and he’s sliding inside, the heft of him like a spear spreading Peter open, and Peter’s never felt anything so amazing in his life. He sobs, face heated, but then Tony’s down on his elbows and soothing the tears away from his face with his thumbs, kissing him over and over and saying, “_Peter, Peter,” _like a refrain.

Peter’s lost the capacity for speech. He drags his lips across Tony’s cheek and hopes Tony understands what he means.

And he does. He must, because he pushes all the way home.

#

Every villain knows the best way to get to Spider-Man is through his squishy heart.

Hit him where it hurts, and he’s blind as a bat. Send him Life Model Decoys of his parents and he’ll let his guard down so fast you’ll get whiplash. Kidnap his best friend and he’ll do anything you want to save her, threaten his aunt and he’ll fall to pieces, he’ll be looking over his shoulder every second of every day, beating him will be an absolute cakewalk. Peter knows his loved ones have always been his weak point, which is why he kind of figured that now that he didn’t have anyone he’d be stronger. Better.

Except now there’s Tony. Now he has Tony, and there’s nothing he wouldn’t do to keep him, to make sure he’s safe and happy and alive. Norman Osborn could take Tony and say, hand me your lungs, and Peter would do it. Peter would pull his chest apart with his bare hands and reach up inside his ribcage and grab his lungs while they were still pumping air, inflating and deflating like bloody balloons, and hand them over.

#

Tony’s knees slide on the sheets. Peter presses against his ass with his heels, and Tony bottoms out inside him with a shocked exhalation of air, his fists twisted in the pillows at Peter’s head. Everything is Tony, and sex. The smell of latex, sweat, lube. Motor oil and copper and expensive aftershave. Peter tugs Tony’s lower lip between his teeth and Tony grunts as he pulls out and shoves into him again, slow but strong.

Peter wraps around him with all his limbs, every tiny muscle in his body quivering with exertion and desire, stuck between wanting to come and not wanting to come too soon. He keeps his lips on Tony’s while Tony moves inside him, keeps his eyes open so he can see that it’s real--it’s really him, the love of Peter’s fucking life, the ghost who came to Peter in his dreams, here and solid and in his bed.

It’s like nothing he’s ever felt, making love to Tony Stark.

Peter feels surrounded, he feels taken care of in a way he hasn’t since he was very young. Tony’s facial hair brushes his flushed face, his fingertips skate over Peter’s shoulder, he buries his face in the side of Peter’s neck, panting, “I’ve got you, kid, I’ve got you,” and Peter holds onto him and feels the bones of Tony’s pelvis pressing into his ass and the head of Tony’s dick rammed so deep in his body it’s like he can taste it and knows that right now there’s not a single thing in the world that can hurt either of them.

“Tony,” he says, not knowing what he’s asking for. “Tony, Tony, Tony--”

“I’ve got you, baby.”

Tony shifts his weight to one side and reaches down between them, still moving shallowly inside Peter but not pulling out anymore, just rolling deeper and deeper. His hand closes around Peter’s dick, and Peter shouts, he actually fucking _shouts_, a sharp sound that turns into desperate, begging sobs as Tony pumps his big, calloused hand, squeezing Peter’s shaft through the slick of sweat and lube and precome, and it only takes two strokes, Peter’s dick in Tony’s hand and Tony still filling him up so much that his insides can’t clench, they can only stutter--and he comes.

“Fuck,” Tony says, watching him. “Jesus, kid, you’re perfect. You’re--”

“Come in me,” Peter gasps. “Come in me, Tony.”

Tony groans and drops back onto both elbows, a man destroyed. “I swear to God, Pete, you’re gonna be the death of me.”

Peter rolls his hips. He’s wrung out and shaky, but he still loves how Tony’s dick feels inside him, like a steel rod. “Come on, old man. Move it.”

“I see you bounce back fast. Full sentences and everyth--_guh._”

The _guh _comes as Peter slicks two of his fingers up with his own come and reaches down to shove them in alongside Tony’s dick. It’s a strange sensation, his hole stretched as far as it can go, Tony’s dick throbbing against his fingers, but Tony’s hips stutter involuntarily, and there’s this _look _on his face--like betrayal and anguish and adoration all in one, so Peter figures he did something right. He moves his fingers, and feels Tony’s dick move too, feels the slippery latex of the condom sliding over his knuckles like water, and Tony shoves back in and _swears_and Peter’s vision whites out with overstimulation.

Tony’s nose presses against Peter’s chest, he bites out, “Fuck, Pete--” and then there’s a hot burst of come filling the condom right alongside Peter’s fingers, and some of it squishes out at the base but Peter couldn’t care less because Tony’s shaking in his arms, collapsing on top of him, completely spent.

“I love you,” Peter murmurs into Tony’s hair, while they both drift back down to earth. “Please don’t leave me alone again. I love you.”

#

Later, as evening turns into night and Peter starts thinking about getting out of bed to put his suit on, Tony frames the tattoo with his hands: **don’t panic.**

“Hitchhiker’s Guide?” he asks.

“No.” Peter smiles up at him from where he’s laid out on top of the sheets, sideways on the bed, half on the pillows. “I started having panic attacks, after Thanos, and after a while I didn’t really have anyone to get me through them. So…”

“A little on the nose, isn’t it?”

Peter shrugs. “It works for me. Well, most of the time.”

Tony presses a loving kiss to the tattoo, holds there for a long minute, his thumb moving over Peter’s hipbone, and then sits up.

“If Karen’s schedule prediction software is correct,” he says, “which I know it is, because I designed it--it’s time for you to get ready for patrols.”

Peter sits up, too. “Exactly how much have you been spying on me?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Nope.”

Peter rolls out of bed and stretches, then goes to pull on his suit. Tony watches him the whole time, and Peter’s not sure whether he’s appreciating Peter’s naked body or his own suit design, but he’s not sure he cares, either. He pads over, kneels on the edge of the bed, and pulls Tony into a long kiss.

Tony hums when he pulls back, dropping a peck on the shell of Peter’s ear. “Stay safe, okay? This whole ‘no dying’ thing is a two-way street.”

Peter nods. “Yeah. Are you gonna be here when I get back?”

“Do you want me to be?”

“I get what you were saying now, about the dumb and smart.”

“Excuse me?”

“Of course I want you to be here.” Peter hits the button on his suit to suction it to his body, headed for the window. “I always want you here, Tony. Like, forever.”

Tony smiles, still sitting on the edge of the bed. “Okay. I think I can do that.”

“Good,” Peter says. “See you soon.”

He tumbles out the window, and as he’s falling--as the freezing night air rushes past and the pavement rushes up--Peter realizes he’s happy to be alive.

#

It’s a tough patrol.

By the time dawn is threatening the edges of the skyline, Peter’s limping home with a bunch of cracked ribs, a split lip, a shard of glass sticking out of his calf, and a nasty bruise spreading up his entire left side, from his hip to his underarm. He pulls himself feebly up through the bedroom window, dripping blood, and starts heading for the bathroom, where he keeps the heavy duty first aid kit under the sink.

Then there’s a soft noise behind him, and Peter whips around, still on edge. But it’s just Tony. _Tony_, in his apartment, waiting for him to get home, in lounge pants and bare feet, and he guides Peter to sit on the edge of the tub and pulls the glass out of his leg and starts stitching up his wounds, babbling the whole time about some new sustainable biofuel he’s been working on in Peter’s kitchen all night.

Tony’s putting Peter back together, but at the same time, Peter thinks he’s taking him apart. Taking apart all the building blocks that make up a Spider-Man without Peter Parker, undoing all the mods he made so he could get through it alone and rewiring based on a new premise, the simplest premise in the world: you and me. forever.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] The body heroic.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24500254) by [sophinisba](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sophinisba/pseuds/sophinisba)


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